The previous article about this topic dates back to March 2010, so it was due an update because there were so many new developments in the past two years, including CS5.5

Basically you can think along three roads, a budget PC, an economical PC and the warrior PC. Notice that MAC is not mentioned here. There are three reasons for that, one is I'm not qualified to really advise on MAC's, two is that they are way overpriced and three they are severely limited in component choices. So this is all about PC.

Whether you want to have a budget, economical or warrior PC, there are a number of common components that you will always need, a case, a PSU, CPU cooler, monitor, keyboard, mouse, DVD/BR burner and stuff like that so I'm not going into those components, with the exception of case, PSU and CPU cooler.

CASE:

While the case of your choice is often determined by looks and what appeals to you (or your CFO, the wife), I want to stress that for all categories, budget, economical or warrior, it is better to use a BIG tower, instead of a mid tower.

Why, you may wonder. Actually there are a lot of reasons. Mid towers can limit your choices in CPU coolers, because the case is not wide enough to install certain CPU coolers. The height of the cooler does not fit in the case. They can limit your choice of video card, because these have grown in length significantly and mid towers often do not allow the installation of certain video cards due to the limited depth or prevent you from installing hard disks in certain slots. Mid towers will limit your expansion capabilities (less drive cages), make installation of components more difficult, have limited cable management features, have limited airflow and tend to become hotter than big towers and thus more noisy (the fans need to run at higher speed) and limit overclockabilty.

A BIG tower is the (only) way to go.

PSU:

The PSU is one of the most crucial components in any system but also the one component most often overlooked. A good PSU will give you years of reliable work on your PC, a suboptimal or mediocre PSU will give you tremendous headaches and unexplainable crashes, hangs or errors, causing you to miss deadlines.

Go to eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Pro v2.5 and get the Pro version. Enter all your components, including planned expansions, set the Motherboard to High End - Desktop, set the CPU Utilization (TDP) to 100%, set System Load to 100% and Capacitor Aging to 30% and press the Calculate button. Add 10 - 15% to this Wattage for safety and note the required amperage on the various rails (+3.3V, +5V and +12V). Based on these figures, select a good GOLD label PSU, that meets the total wattage and the amperage on each rail. It is your best guarantee for long and reliable, troublefree editing.

Budget, economical or warrior system

Before going into these three systems, you can consider them to be a rough 'Best-buying Guide', let me remind you of the basic practical system requirements for CS5.5 and consider your own workflow to interpret these charts.

It starts with the codec:

Since DSLR is getting so popular, let me remind you that this is ranked under the 'Difficult' codecs and P2 is an 'Easy' codec. The more difficult the codec you use, the higher the system requirements. See:

As a rough translation from 'Easy', 'Intermediate' and 'Difficult' to the kind of system you want to build, you could say that 'Easy' can be handled quite well with a 'Budget' system, 'Intermediate' is best handled by an 'Economical' or better system and 'Difficult' requires an 'Economical' or better system. A 'Budget' system may struggle with the load of such 'Difficult' codecs.

Note that in the following table, I have mentioned components in each category. These are just examples of what could fit in each category, they are not necessarily a combination of components that I would build per se.

Also note that I have not chosen the fastest CPU in each category, but only unlocked CPU's. Each can be overclocked for optimal results and then will deliver a better Bang-For-The-Buck (BFTB) than the highest clocked CPU in that range. Finally, note that the budget system can benefit from increasing memory to 4 x 4 GB for only € 38 extra. That is the weakest link in the budget system.

Prices mentioned are current day prices in the Netherlands (01-11-2012) including 19% VAT.

Here are my suggestions:

The main difference in comparison to the previous guide, is that the i7-3930K appears to be faster and better affordable than a dual Xeon X5680 system.

Anyway, I hope this helps people comtemplating a new system to get the right components in an affordable system.

Nice job on the chart, Harm! However, some of the "easy" codecs are nowhere near as easy as the chart seems to indicate simply because some of those codecs actually require massive disk performance and size just to be handled properly. And DV and HDV is "easy" only because of their lower resolution and moderate-to-high compression (these codecs are limited to 25 Mbps total). Less-compressed codecs (even at extremely low resolutions) require much, much more disk space - and thus, much, much higher disk I/O system performance.

And "difficult" codecs are "difficult" due to the CPU horsepower that's often required of them. And AVCHD not only requires a relatively robust CPU to handle properly, but also require somewhat faster than "standard" disk performance due to the fact that most NLEs decompress and recompress video on the fly. (For Premiere Pro CS5.x, 4:2:0 AVCHD video gets decompressed to uncompressed 4:2:2 during the editing stage, and then gets recompressed into the desired output format during encoding. Some other NLEs are natively 4:4:4 RGB - and all material gets converted to 4:4:4 RGB in those NLEs and then to the desired output format on the fly.)

"For instance, uncompressed MS AVI SD material. No GOP structure, no compression, low resolution, that should be at the top left corner, right? Wrong. Uncompressed does not burden the CPU, but is a definite burden on the memory and disk I/O system."

That makes perfect sense, Scott. I have no knowledge of your sales distribution over the various systems, but would not be surprised if it came out like this, in turnover volume, not in number of systems:

1) The motherboard that you spec'd, Gigabyte's GA-X79-UD7, only has 4 RAM slots and will not take the 8x8GB sticks you listed; note that Gigabyte's "lesser" UD5 board however does indeed have 8 RAM slots

2) Suggest ARC-1882 series controller cards; I'm not sure what all has improved, but it definitely has a better looking cooler than the 2 different styles of 1880ix heat sinks that Areca put out (1st had 2 small passive heat sinks and did not cool very well, 2nd had a large heat sink and cooled better). Neither is as effective for a workstation case as the old 1680ix design like I think that you use currently, which has 1 small passive heat sink + a 2nd fan cooled heat sink.

I've been planning my next DIY computer for several months now and my first battle was finding information from someone I could trust, and that delivered information in a clear, logical, and unbiased standpoint.

Gary from VideoGuys has been a real inspiration and I rush to my PC every morning and check for DIY9 blog updates, already started buying parts! As the DIY9 system is linked to a modest budget, I need to now weigh up whether to tweak it upward$ to a (let's say) "DIY9 UNLEASHED" - full tower, water cooling etc, or stick to the exact components recommended. The information you've provided is very valuable and makes great sense - thank you again.

Thomas - thank you also for the link to the Tsunami system - very interesting! Thank you for sharing information and component choices.

Once I learnt to ignore a certain other long time contributor who comes across with a real combatitive attitude, and who is very "secret squirrel" about internal component choices, it became much clearer who to listen to.

Just for fun, I decided to have a look at one of your Tsunami systems. It again shows that unless you are not equipped with two opposable thumbs, capable of grasping at straws, you are much better off building a system yourself. It saves a lot of $$$.

1) The cheapest option, the GTX 580, is also the best option for CS5.5 performance. Premiere Pro does not take full advantage of the Quadros, and that the Adobe apps actually perform slower with any of the three Quadros offered than with the GTX 580 simply due to the inferior hardware specs of the Quadros (in fact, the Quadro 6000 is actually based on the older GTX 470 with a 384-bit GDDR5 RAM bus instead of the 320-bit bus the actual GTX 470 used). The Quadro 4000 suggested by that shop is actually the slowest GPU out of all of those, based on performance in CS5.5. Note that despite my rant, the Quadros do make sense if you frequently run applications that either make good use of the Quadro's capabilities or absolutely require a Quadro just to even run at all.

2) That vendor does not offer even an aid0 array, let alone a RAID, for any of its Tsunami systems even at extra cost. The only disks offered at all are all single, non-RAID disks.

3) The Thermaltake Armor A60 case offered is not good enough for a serious editing system: It can barely fit a GTX 580 inside. Worse, its air circulation inside is poorer than even an Antec Nine Hundred, let alone the Cooler Master HAF series cases, due to its single front 120mm intake fan and the arrangement of its hard drives (the sideways-mounted hard drives result in the hard drive mounting bracket almost completely obstructing intake airflow, leaving only a single 120mm side-panel-mounted fan to provide intake airflow to the rest of the case).

4) The power supply is not specified at all. It could have been a poor-quality unit that could barely handle even half of its claimed wattage.

And all that costs more money than their constituent components are worth, even though there is a cost premium for assembly and testing.

Some folks like to DIY, but we find that many of our DIY readers really want to find someone who can build a machine for them, they just need to understadn what specs they need. So our DIY guide becomes teh starting point for their system shopping. Which is why we updated our recommended turnkey NLE workstation dealers page:

Get a turnkey NLE solution from an expert NLE integrator. You can follow this link to a list of turnkey providers recommended by the Videoguys. All of the companies featured on this page make excellent NLE workstations, fully loaded and optimized for long format video editing.

Both ADk and Safe Harbor are on the list. One of the advantages of a turnkey over a DIY is that the resellers we recommend take the time to test and tweak their systems. Many times they have relationships with Intel or the motherboard vendors that gets them advanced looks and even access to system design support teams.

I'd like to thank Harm for this thread, his research and the time he puts in onthese forums. He is a great asset for the Adobe community.

You sound like you know your stuff, however it's very confusing to the average punter like me to build a nice editing system with such conflicting information. You have given the impression above that the Quadro 4000 is an inferior card for editing with CS5.5 - however it is currently the top card recommended by Gary @ Videoguys. And that for some bizarre reason an 80-Plus Gold PSU is going to make a better machine than having a Thermaltake PSU??

Technology is evolving at such a fast rate these days, but the launch of the newest and fastest does not make current technology instantly inferior.

I would suggest that you are technically correct, but living too much in a benchmarking world. In a real world, isn't it more helpful to say that "both the Quadro 4000 and GTX580 are very powerful nVidia cards and either would make a great choice for CS5.5 editing."

If I'm currently using a Quadro 4000, and then "upgrade" to a GTX580, would it (a) totally change my life and revolutionise my business, or (b) shave a couple of micro-seconds off a render which I'd probably wouldn't even notice?

Are you suggesting I sell my current Quadro 4000 card - which as far as I can tell is working like a rocket, and spend $$$ on a GTX560 or GTX580? I do basic long-form editing with HD1080 footage. Would it knock my socks off, or would I hardly notice the difference?

Actually, Dr. Jared, the Thermaltake Toughpower Grand PSU is 80-Plus Gold certified. The difference is the platforms that the various 80-Plus Gold certified PSUs are based on. The Toughpower Grand is based on a premium CWT (Channel Well Tech)-manufactured platform.

Thermaltake's poor professional reputation for its PSUs can be attributed to the TR2 and TR2 RX series PSUs: Most if not all of those cannot handle anywhere close to their labeled wattage ratings without their DC output quality going out of the ATX spec. For example, the TR2 RX "850W" model can only provide up to about 550W under realistic internal operating temperatures.

And yes, Dr. Jared, the Quadro 4000 is weaker than a GTX 460 SE: The Quadro 4000 has only 256 CUDA cores versus 288 CUDA cores in the GTX 460 SE. By contrast, the plain GTX 560 has 336 CUDA cores, while the GTX 570 and 580 have 480 and 512 CUDA cores, respectively.

And yes, Quadro 4000s sell used for more money than the full retail cost of a brand-new GTX 580. So, you actually earn some money just selling the Quadro 4000 and buying a GTX 580.

We have been recommedning the GTX470 and now the 570/580 for Adobe CS5.x as the best value and performance for the Mercury Engine. I posted the hacks on our website to enable the broader CUDA cards to work when Adobe only had Quadro cards and the GTX460 listed.

We recommend the Quadro cards based on our need to support Avid (they only certify Quadro cards) and the added "stability" they offer. Quadro cards have a longer life cycle, and the drivers don't change as often as the gamer cards. So while they aren't always the hottest or fastest cards, you know what your getting and you know they work. We run into customers with stability and crashing issues all the time. Many times it is the GPU that is the culprit. Our go to tech solutions is to get thema Quadro card. Why? Because it works and it leaves our customers happy.

You have directed your posts to me and not to anyone else. (see in response to:...). That is no problem for me, but let me emphasize that in the screenshot I posted, I only mentioned three distinct type of PC's in very different price categories and for very different purposes. As I said in my post I used "example" components that could well apply to a typical PC in that range. That means that a newly build PC could very well contain quite diferent components or move into a gray area between two distinct categories. Remember this overview only serves the purpose of showing what a PC can look like in a certain price range, nothing more. It certainly is not a law to follow, it is an indication of my opinion with the current state of affairs.

Whether one person is happy or not with a Quadro 4000 card is up to that person. The whole discussion seems a waste of time. If you are happy with your 4000, great. If someone needs to buy a card, then there are better and more affordable cards available, delivering a better BFTB. As long as people realize that, they can make their own decisions.

Hi Harm - sorry, I was using the 'reply to original post' button - didn't see the 'reply' one.

Comments were not directed at you but at Scott. I was trying to get his commitment to my that selling my Quadro4000 and replacing it with a GTX580 would be of noticable REAL WORLD benefit, or if he's just arguing theoretical benchmark schemantics.

Personally I think when the GTX590-Ti-Pro-Ferma3-hyper is released, he'll be telling me the GTX580 is a waste of time and only losers use them.

I'm not going to fight with you. For some reason you just can't seem to understand the fact that you are an "EXPERT" integrator, and our DIY articles are for everyone else. Even after I recommend folks buy integrated systems from you ;-)

Bad mouthing Avid support has nothing to do with this discussion or your points. I don't know why you feel you must go there. You don't have to always rip other companies and vendors to show off how good you are. Let your systems do that for you.

I get calls and emails from end users everyday. We offer free tech support for everything we sell, plus folks just come to us for advice. Replacing the graphics card with a Quadro card solves so many stability problems for so many customers.

As I said - we recommend the GTX570/580 as the go to solution for Adobe. You are entitled to your opionion about Quadro cards. I'm not saying you are wrong, just that one size does not always fit all.

Please please please try to keep this thread thoughtful and positive. Harm did a great job - lets not derail this thread.